In this summer period, there are many people on the “Prom”. And the work is so imposing that it cannot be ignored. So, the curious approach and discover inside the XXL cigarette packet, in the colors of a famous American brand, thousands of cigarette butts. 10,000 to be precise.
On this new Toolate creation is inscribed “Here is the work of a bunch of big idiots”. The cigarette butts were picked up by the Nice Plogging collective, which regularly organizes waste collection operations in the city.
Exasperated to see so many cigarette butts thrown on the ground or on the shores of beaches, Toolate does not go hand in hand with the incivility of certain smokers. “This work is above all a rant against human bullshit” he explains by email to our colleagues from France 3 Côte d’Azur. Because Toolate prefers to remain anonymous and does not grant an interview. “Throwing away your cigarette butt is not just a question of clean beaches, it goes further than that: between the pollution of the oceans, the fires that it can cause…” he writes. “People who smoke are within their rights to damage their health, but not to damage the planet” he adds.
To change the behaviors that pollute, such is the objective of this visual artist. On the Promenade des Anglais, facing the beautiful blue, his work obviously leaves no one indifferent. “People don’t pay attention to the planet. I go to the beach regularly and it’s true that it’s disgusting” says a passerby. “It pollutes and it’s a good message for ecology” adds a young girl. “It’s good. I’ll see many from everywhere on the beach” enthuses a young man.
Reactions which should delight Toolate, which is not its first creation in favor of the defense of the environment. In November 2020, he had organized, in the streets of Paris, the exhibition of 50 surgical masks thrown away in the capital. Waste presented in frames with this title: “Here is the work of an asshole”.
Two months earlier, he had replaced the labels of 200 Coca-Cola bottles, in 20 supermarkets in Nice, with a text explaining that the American firm is particularly polluting. An act of activism accompanied on his Instagram account by the publication of a fake photo, which shows a child on a beach making a castle with plastic Coca-Cola bottles. A cliché which, at the time, had of course made waves.
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